Big Data 2015-2016: A Look Back And A Look Ahead

If you follow Big Data, you would have to be living under a rock to have missed the Spark juggernaut. The extensive use of in-memory processing has helped machine learning go mainstream, because the speed of processing enables the system to quickly detect patterns and provide actionable artificial intelligence. It ha surfaced in data prep/data curation tools, where the system helps you get an idea of what’s in your big data and how it fits together, and in a new breed of predictive analytics tools that are now, thanks to machine learning, starting to become prescriptive. Yup, Cloudera brought Spark to our attention a couple years back as the eventual successor to MapReduce, but it was the endorsement of IBM (NYSE:IBM), backed by commitment of 3,500 developers and $300 million…